I think my host family finds me to be slightly dour (and more than a little simple). Most people who encounter me in English-speaking contexts do not, I hope, share this impression. In English, I’m funny (usually) and loud (sometimes) and a presence to be reckoned with.
But in French (and it’s even more difficult cousin, Frolof), I’m unable to joke. I’m also usually unable to understand other people’s jokes. It’s a crapshoot as to whether I’m able to respond to direct questions, most of the time. About the only thing I’m able to do with any consistency is obey direct orders to go get things out of the kitchen, and even then they have to be set out for me or I’m unable to find them. Continue reading →
So one of the news stations in Dakar (Walf TV, the favorite of my family) enjoys using the Rocky theme song as lead-in and lead-out music. Normally this is just an amusing bit of copyright violation, but tonight it took on a dimension of the surreal.
For those not up to speed on Senegalese politics, it was recently ruled that the current president can run for a third term. To make this happen, he bought off the constitutional council (who decided this). Folks are mad, and have spent parts of the last week rioting. End history lesson! Continue reading →
So you know what makes people like 8 billion more times more likely to not think you’re an asshole? Stumbling through “hello” in their first language. (Shocking, I know.) I entered Senegal with the impression that this language was, for most people, French. It’s not. Instead, it’s Wolof–and now that I know how to appropriately greet people in it* people are substantially less likely to glare at me. Success.
As far as I know, Senegal is unusual in rejecting the colonial language in favor of a native language for the lingua franca. Though there are of course other major languages in Africa in general and in countries specifically (like Swahili and Hausa), countries like Kenya use the colonial language in public discourse in attempt to appear forward-looking to the west. Continue reading →
Today was my first full day in Dakar. (I got in yesterday, but after two days of more-or-less nonstop plane travel punctuated by actually falling asleep without conscious input, I think that yesterday does not count.)
The day was filled with the sort of awkward smalltalk that punctuates any first-time gathering of college kids. It was like the first few weeks of college, except that everyone talked about wanting to go into development. I don’t, and have neglected to mention that I am in fact an anthropology major. Some of the folks seem to hold us in disfavor.
My new commute to school (at least for the moment) involves jaywalking across a large highway. It is every bit as fun as you can imagine. (ie, not really at all. It is mostly terrifying.) Continue reading →
Today, I had a frustrating discussion about sexual assault.
It started out relatively well. While driving somewhere, I was riffing with a friend about the fact that Senegal—where I will be going soon—has something of a street harassment problem. We joked that this had something to do with the country’s French colonial past. (Paris has a by all accounts more physically agressive street harassment culture.)
I joked that I was going to try to mimic the Senegalese response, which I find amusingly direct—a few months ago, I spoke to a graduate student who does research there and she noted that Senegalese women often go with a blunt “Nah, you’re ugly” in response to marriage proposals.
There is of course the more evasive route suggested by my guidebook, which is to murmur “maybe next time” in Wolof, which is apparently a culturally-accepted way to brush someone off politely. I said that in reality I would probably use this response, since I’m not that confrontational. (I could also go with the American response of pretending to understand neither French or Wolof and wandering blankly past.)
Another passenger in the car, who was a friend of my friend and who I had just met, said, “You don’t want to give them false hope or make them angry. That’s a good way to get raped.”
I responded that statistically, that’s untrue. Most sexual assaults involve alcohol and disorientation. He said he disagreed. I gave up and another passenger in the car changed the subject.
But seriously? I am so tired of having to pretend that random boys get an input on the likelihood of someone trying to assault me by virtue of their Having Feelings on the issue.
Are you Senegalese? No.
Have you been to Senegal? No.
Is the threat of sexual assault something that you have to negotiate in your daily existence on a college campus? No.
So no, your feelings about my likelihood of suffering a violent crime in a Scary Foreign Country with Scary Dark Men do not, in fact, get to be treated as more than the baseless, victim-blaming bullshit they are while I am giving you a ride in my car.
In fact, here is a comprehensive list of ways to increase your likelihood of “getting raped.”
Be around a rapist when he decides to rape you.
There we go.
But, since we’re talking about Feelings, here are mine on how to increase your likelihood of getting punched.
Be the sort of clueless asshole who brings up rape in the car of someone who’s driving you.
Refuse to back down.
Refuse to deal in things like “facts” or “lived experiences.”
See, sharing our Feelings can be super productive. I’m glad we had this talk.
Recently, a friend of mine who just returned from a semester abroad in Capetown sent me a link to Gurl Goes to Africa. The site is basically a Failbook for peoples’ pictures from their study abroad experiences in various African countries. I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about the site.
On the one hand, some of the material showcased—the photos of white Americans quite literally riding on the backs of Africans—are cringeworthy. Folks should know better than to a) do that and b) photograph and post it without massive context provided.
A lot of the photos aren’t that offensive, but are of the “starving African child with white person” genre—they’re aid brochure photos. And I do think that the comments on the photos (many of which are along the lines of “I couldn’t tell which one was you! lol”) deserve to be critiqued.
However, I think the site conflates the two and assigns them equal degrees of offensiveness when they’re not there. Should we question why photos of children are the dominant narrative for peoples’ study abroad experiences in various parts of Africa? Of course.
But—and I say this as someone who will no doubt take photos of her host siblings—not all photos of children are racist holdovers. Some are just the acknowledgement of the existence of children in the location that one traveled to. Photos of random street children (or other peoples’ kids) are offensive, but photos of people you know who happen to be children aren’t, at least to me.
What becomes an issue is when that’s all you photograph. However, because of the Failbook setup of the blog, the photos are all from individual contributers. I have no idea if this is one photo of a person’s host brother, or one of eighty photos of the Poor African Children.
The other issue that bothers me a little bit is that the blog is aggressively mocking women. White American women make up the majority (like 90%) of the people made fun of in the posts. The blog’s name makes fun of women travelers specifically. There are some men featured, but if the blog’s intent is to make fun of the Africa as Country view (as well as the Africa as Location for Anti-Consumerist Fantasies of the Wealthy view) then men and women can be more equally lampooned. I find it uncomfortable that there is page after page after page just of women being somewhat cattily made fun of. It implies a view that men aren’t as silly as these Gurls are.
My suspicion is that the blog author just particularly dislikes photos of Americans and African children (legitimately problematic) but that as a result of women being more likely to interact with children when traveling, the photos are skewed.
The behavior and viewpoint that the blog is satirizing deserve to be made fun of. But the way in which it’s done makes me uncomfortable. Am I just being oversensitive?
It’s something of a joke among those who live in close quarters with me that I tend to dress in uniforms. This probably comes from the same part of me that can spend a month watching 6 seasons of a foreign TV show, twice, without tiring of it basically being the same show each week. I am comfortable with routine.
The most recent iteration of the uniform was a blazer, a scoop neck t-shirt, jeggings, red shoes, and a large scarf. Because all my shoes are red and all of my t-shirts are the same thing in different colors, this allowed for a variety of outfits with pretty much no effort. Plus, I always had a built-in blanket for cold classrooms. It was a win win.
Recently, however, I’ve moved away from the blazer-scarf-jeggings power look. I got tired of having a sweaty neck all of the time.
Without meaning to, I have settled in to a new uniform. For the past three days (I really wish I was exaggerating for effect, here) I have worn one of my two pairs of skinny jeans, one of the same scoop neck tees, and a tweed jacket that looks like a stole it off a very narrow-shouldered male archaeologist. The jacket is reversible, so if I tire of the tweed* I can revisit my elementary school uniform and wear some khaki instead.
The uniform, combined with my short hair and a non-expression that I am told makes me look very angry, tends to make me look sort of like a teenaged boy. I think that part of it is me making myself as unnoticeable as possible using the things over which I have control over for when I go to Dakar. I can’t control being white and American, but I can confine myself to earth tones with the best of them.
But I think even without the trip abroad, I’d be moving in that same direction. There was a period in high school where my wardrobe was hyperfeminine, as was my hair—there were a lot of sundresses and pincurls and pencil skirts. Without me noticing, my wardrobe has shifted from red into blue into grey and brown over the last semester.
I spent so much of this year being anxious whenever I spoke in class and hoping that I would be sort of ignored. Of course, I still raised my hand in class and pretty much never shut up**, but I felt bad when I did. It was a really weird combination of feelings and impulses, and I think that the move into more muted colors and more androgynous cuts of clothing had something to do with it.
But, even as my clothes become less colorful, I am struck by how I feel when I’m wearing them. When I’m channeling Agyness Deyn with some combat boots and the punker jacket, I feel powerful in a way that sundresses and heels didn’t necessarily make me feel. It’s superficial, but there’s something to be said for the knowledge that you could kick some ass in your clothing.
The weather now is similar to what the weather will be when I go abroad. All signs point to me keeping more or less this uniform while I’m there. I’m interested to see whether my feelings about power and clothing stay the same while I’m traveling. I suspect that they will not.
This got to be much more serious than I intended. Because what I originally wanted to share about the jacket that makes up the main part of the new uniform is that it’s reversible, it’s tweed, and it cost me $6.95.
I am the queen of thrift stores.
* I will not tire of the tweed.
** I thirst for external approval like a vampire for blood. Blame magnet school.
I have high hopes for my study abroad experience. If it’s anything like I’ve been told it will be, I’m in for several months of horizon-broadening, soul-searching, and digestive issues that will make for hilarious stories when I’m slightly removed from the whole experience. I am looking forward to it.
But what I had not anticipated was just how much I was going to learn from the pre-travel experience. I had naively assumed that—since I left for my holiday travels with everything sort of in check—I was more or less set to go already. This was incorrect.
For example, I’ve learned that getting anti-malarial medication that does not make you prone to hallucinations (possibly cool, but not recommended for the morose) or yeast infections (the seriousness of which the male doctor completely discounted and female nurse practitioner was completely conscious of) is crazy-making should you want to a) avoid spending $350 b) want to go abroad for more than 90 days. I have spent so much time on the phone shuttling my poor malarone prescription around digital pharmacies that the nurse at my travel clinic is now on a first name basis with me. If I get malaria, I plan to blame the people behind my prescription drug plan.*
I’ve also learned that the footwear that any individual possesses will be considered completely inadequate by everyone else she meets, even if she is traveling to an urban area and unlikely to be doing nature hikes. In my case, this resulted in a peer pressured (and somewhat panicked) eBay purchase of the sort of mary janes that have arch support and can best be described as “not offensively ugly.” They are the sort of shoes that one might wear with an a-line khaki skirt with some cargo pockets and a muted long-sleeve t-shirt from REI. The fact that I own neither of those articles of clothing did not stop me from buying the shoes.
But perhaps most importantly, the pre-travel process gives you some insight into yourself. Like, for example, knowledge of whether you’re the sort of person who will talk herself into a panic attack because TravelVisa sent her passport a week ago via USPS** and it hasn’t arrived at the house and what is going to happen if I don’t have my passport and my visa, I won’t be able to leave the country. For example.
I mean, it’s probably just delayed in the mail. Right? Nothing to worry about.***
* I have also learned that if you are uninsured, travel to a malaria-prone region is financially almost impossible. My drugs were going to be $350 as a copay.
** No, really. Yes, I know.
*** Totally something to worry about. It could have been lost or eaten by mail goblins, and you know how long it takes to get a new passport oh my god I am so screwed.
Dances With Nerds 